As it stands, Google Hangouts and Skype have something of a stranglehold on the video conferencing market. For the most part, those tools work well enough, but the barriers to entry are surprisingly high. Mozilla is setting out to change that by building video conferencing directly into Firefox, and eliminating the need for accounts or dedicated clients.

Mozilla dabbled on Apple’s platform a few years back with an app dubbed “Firefox Home,” but the company has largely shied away from iOS due to Apple’s restrictions surrounding rendering engines. Now, Mozilla is changing course, and bringing a version of Firefox to iOS running WebKit.

Starting in 2015, everyone will be able to get their hands on a free, officially sanctioned SSL/TLS certificate so that HTTPS can finally be enabled everywhere. The new service — a certificate authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt — is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai joining as major launch partners. If you don’t know much about SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, trust me when I say that this is a very big deal.

Firefox isn’t the go-to browser for the nerdy crowd anymore, but that hasn’t stopped Mozilla from working hard to improve the internet on the whole. Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox Developer Edition — a web browser with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) built right in. If you’re in the web development business, this means that Firefox just became relevant again.

At long last, Google has released a stable 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows. It’s faster, more secure, and more stable. Some tasks, such as decoding HD video on YouTube, are 15% faster under the 64-bit version of Chrome. The only major caveat seems to be a lack of support for 32-bit NPAPI plug-ins — Silverlight and Java, and lots of lesser-known plug-ins, won’t work on 64-bit Chrome. That’s a small price to pay for increased speed, security, and twice the stability of 32-bit Chrome, though.

Here’s a lovely bit of irony for you: Adblock Plus, which is by far the most popular add-on for Firefox and Chrome, is actually increasing the amount of memory used by your web browser, rather than decreasing it. Furthermore, ABP also increases the amount of time (and CPU cycles) required to render a website. Instead of making web surfing more responsive, ABP actually makes your surfing experience slower.

Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android has been released. On the desktop side of the equation, Firefox 28 adds support for the VP9 video codec… and that’s about it. Why I hear you ask? Well, Firefox 28 was meant to include the long-awaited Windows 8 Metro version of the browser — but at the last minute, citing almost zero demand for Windows 8’s Metro interface and ‘flat’ growth, Mozilla’s vice president for Firefox decided to terminate the project and pull the code out of version 28.

As you probably know, images — in particular JPEGs — make up the vast majority of a web page’s overall size. The other elements — text, stylesheets, scripts — usually account for just a few percent of the total page size. If the file size of images could be reduced by just a few percent, huge speed gains and bandwidth savings could be realized — for home and office surfers, but more importantly for people on woefully constrained and metered mobile data connections. Mozilla’s latest effort, mozjpeg, aims to do that just, by reducing the size of JPEGs by 10% or more.

How does an ad-powered web browser sound to you? You might think of the idea as old-fashioned or dystopian, but Mozilla is on its way to delivering sponsored content slots to new Firefox users. This move has raised eyebrows across the community, and rightfully so. Mozilla is largely seen as a bastion of user advocacy, so this decision is slightly jarring to some. Even so, with a track record as solid as Mozilla’s, the company deserves the benefit of the doubt until we actually see these ads in practice.

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